Tag Archives: declare your pronoun

For those who’ve followed me since I was a Bernie supporter – and before I boarded the Trump Train in July of 2016 — you know that I lost several friends due to my vocal support of Trump on Twitter. Not for sharing my support of Trump on fB, not for sharing my support for him at work, not around my family, not around my friends in our social group in person (because I mentioned nothingabout Trump on any of those platforms or around any of those people), but ONLY for tweeting about it. Yes, you may recall that two of my friends (married to each other) ended their friendship with me because I said on twitter that I could not in good conscience vote for Hillary now that Bernie was out of the race. At the time, I was just warming to Trump and was relieved that he was using terms like fair trade and understood that NAFTA eviscerated the American middle class, and was campaigning on ending endless war and actually defeating ISIS instead of perpetuating the Middle East quagmire for another 15 years (in contrast to Hillary who laughed gleefully about the sodomized-to-death Qaddafi and the cesspool of despair that replaced his strongman rule in Libya after her State Department raped that country). These two ex-friends literally texted me (because that is how you diplomatically end a nine year friendship), “We know it sounds petty, but if you support Trump, we can’t be friends.” So why do I bring them up? Because one of them was a female to male transgender. One who went to Court to get his driver’s license to say M instead of F.

Now, despite the fact that I was shocked and hurt that they (and he especially, because we worked together before he started his hormone therapy and most people unconsciously still automatically referred to him as HER and I accepted him exactly as he wanted to be accepted without further judgment) ended our friendship, I still support trans issues. Why? Because I believe that if we demand that people conform to a social norm that requires deception, then we as a society are complicit in committing fraud against the inevitable victim. A similar example is when society forces gay men to “act straight” and marry women. In that case too, all of society acts as the collective warden who keeps the woman who finds herself in a loveless (and eventually sexless) marriage imprisoned. If people born male who felt like they should have been born female (and the reverse) were allowed to transition without further comment the way gay people are allowed to marry each other, we would avoid the problem of fraud-based unions and all the unhappiness that floods the immediate family as well as the extended tribe from there.

If we demand that people conform to a social norm that requires deception, then we as a society are complicit in committing fraud against the inevitable victim.

But a third category? A “neither he nor she” gender class? People who’d get an X on their driver’s license instead of an M or an F? That’s bullshit. And it’s bullshit of the most insidious kind. Why? Because it’s actually the best way to delegitimize the trans rights movement.

(And by rights, I literally mean, the freedom of my friend and others like him to live as the gender they feel they should have been born into and/or legal protection from the government taking action to prevent him and people like him from doing so. I mean, he’s married to a woman — they go out into the world as man and wife and now that he’s fully transitioned, you’d have no idea he was ever female, unlike, I’m sorry to say, trans women who still give me that man feeling even after they’ve had the ultimate surgery. Although, who knows — I may have met some trans women who transitioned so well that I just took them for born-female individuals when they weren’t. So, ok — benefit of the doubt.)

The best way to stop the movement in its tracks, especially after people like Caitlyn Jenner are helping mainstream America understand that transgender is a thing and does happen, even to extremely masculine men, would be to infiltrate it with people who want to introduce absurdity into the discussion — making ridiculous patently false baseless claims like, “there is no gender.” And here I want to make an important logic-based point. If there is no gender, then how can a person “identify” as the opposite gender? Trans people, by definition (and in order to be diagnosed and prescribed the hormone drugs necessary to “transition” by a medical doctor) must have symptoms that meet this description: “strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one’s own assigned sex that results in significant distress or impairment. People with gender dysphoria desire to live as members of the opposite sex.” The OPPOSITE sex. Without two opposite sexes, you can’t “identify” with the one you’re not. Don’t let me over-explain this — I know you get it. Without two genders, you can’t transition from one to the other. And by gender I mean sex, of course, and by sex, I mean gender in this context (which is why our state I.D.’s as well as our birth certificates say “sex” on them).

So people, every day Americans, were just starting to warm (or thaw?) to the idea of trans people when in walk these pseudo-liberal infiltrators who start blabbing at the mouth this nonsense about gender as a continuum — or, even more counterproductively, about gender as an illusion. And let me say, I too was skeptical of transgenderism and I was raised by an open-minded mom who was in the antiques business and had several gay male friends who were really nice to me and good friends and customers of hers. I never knew homophobia — it just wasn’t part of what I was exposed to growing up. And even I thought “trans” was weird when at age 26 I met my first real life trans person. Really weird. It took getting to know someone close to me who could give me a glimpse into the very real hell he went through during puberty, feeling literally like he was in the wrong body. I mean, it sounded so sad and terrible to me. But I admit, also very bizarre. He had a girlfriend who was a very feminine woman … I had to really process what I was seeing. I slipped often and accidentally used female pronouns to describe him in a way that would not have happened if I had met him after he transitioned and he finally “looked” like a guy after taking Testosterone.

So I get it when everyday people go, “Ok, this is just weird. Is trans like … gay? Cause I’ve known some gays.” Then you put people like Caitlyn Jenner on the TV and they go, “Ok, it’s still weird but it’s less out there than before because Bruce Jenner was an Olympian I’ve heard of. Hmm, I’ll think about it.” So people’s minds opened to what transgenderism is and while the skepticism remained, a national conversation was at least happening. But insert people like the sadistic MAN (below) who was the first in the country to get an X on his Washington, DC driver’s license into the national dialogue and, suddenly, people’s minds shut faster than a cellar door during a late night summer storm. And for good reason. It’s a ploy: it’s a divide and conquer strategy. This guy is a full of shit LIAR who just wants to make people uncomfortable and gets off on it (I suspect – I suspect it makes his DICK hard because he has a DICK because he’s a MAN with a PENIS).

This WaPo story tells of MISTER Nik Sakurai of a Washington, DC who just applied for a big X rather than the standard M on his driver’s license. Guess what? He went to an all boys high school and came out as gay and bi at some point(s) during his senior year. Ok, fine. But then he decides that he’s really more of a They/Them person and “gender neutral” than a He/Him and male. For the logic based reason I described earlier, this undermines the trans movement which requires 2 genders (2 sexes) to transition between, by definition, but it also denigrates the very real pain of trans people who feel that they were born into the wrong body! (Imagine that! Really imagine what that would be like, please! It would be a living horror movie. Only your real life.) But there’s another more sinister component at the core of this attempt to create a third gender. Forced speech. I mentioned earlier that had I met my (former) trans friend after he’d been on Testosterone, I would not have guessed he’d been born female. And how he explained it to me was, “I identify as male” not, “I am really male and in denial of the uterus I have,” but with the acknowledgement/caveat that he is not actually male but would like to appear to be so that society sees him that way because that’s how he feels in his mind. That’s A HUGE difference. The first acknowledges reality and talks about identifying as the opposite gender as a compulsion; the second denies reality, much like Nik here who wants to “identify” with something that doesn’t exist.

D.C. is not the only place where one can obtain a driver’s license that indicates that they identify with an imaginary state of existence. Now Oregon passed a law making it an option on their driver’s licenses too. Watch the brief video about it, courtesy of Big League Politics, below.

Gender neutrality is not real. And we as a society MUST protest the idea that it is, but even more than “we as a society,” actual trans people must fight this concept and these infiltrators, and fight them hard, and WIN. Because the goal of Nik and people like him is not to create a loving accepting society where people can be free to be who they are; it’s to use FORCE to FORCE people to comply to their vision of a gender-LESS society, the one they are taking action to create, every single day.

There’s another more sinister component at the core of this attempt to create a third gender. Forced speech.

In the spring of 2016, I took a class at St Catherine University, at the time a women-only school (I was taking this class with the day students while being enrolled in the Evening Weekend Online program) called “the Philosophy of Sex, Sexuality and Love” and in this class, there was a young woman who was attempting to sort through who and what she was. She was very open about having identified as everything there is possible to identify as, gay, bi, cis (cis is short for cisgender and means born female, identifies as a straight woman OR born male, identifies as a straight man). Presently, she had chosen a gender neutral name and was using male pronouns. Unlike my friend who was literally dying to get on Testosterone at that age and who chose a masculine name when he changed his name (which he did in court, not just by telling everyone, I go by “_______” now), she was very flippant about exploring all the “nonbinary” options. I was struck by something so insincere about her. About her demeanor. About her speech affect. And, I couldn’t help feeling so bad for my friend (all over again) who had felt so profoundly alienated by a female body and wanted nothing more than to have been born male so he wouldn’t have to hurt his family by becoming — literally — someone else. In contrast, this undergrad’s nonchalant chitchat about gender identity came across as shallow and demeaning of actually trans people, whose emotional compulsion to seek the gender role ascribed by society to the opposite sex is unyielding — and authentic. I chalked it up to the normal teenage angst that many people go through and figured that at the least, I’d meet some interesting people in the class and have some interesting philosophical arguments over the course of the semester. But around day two, this immature person revealed her actual desire: to assert dominance over all members of the class by inserting herself into the authority position, usurping the leadership of even the professor in the power dynamic. She “suggested” that we all declare our pronoun. She explained that she was going by he/him (for now, of course — she wasn’t taking Testosterone: “he/him” was her feeling of the year) and would like to know what everyone else goes by. And OF COURSE, no one reacted. Not one of the WOMEN in the class or the WOMAN professor. I blinked. My gut flagged this display as an attempt to assert dominance and leverage control but I was caught so off guard that I was at a loss for words. Could the professor have denied this request? I mean … yes, of course. And so could I have. But I didn’t. I went right a-fucking-long and said, “she/her” as one by one, the class played a distorted version of “duck duck gray duck” chair by chair, woman by woman, force making its way around a circle that made a mockery of any kind of round table discussion.

And here’s why. Force it was. Forced speech. I was forced to speak. I didn’t need to declare my pronoun. No one in the room did. (Did I mention it was a women’s college at the time?) Yet each of us submissively displayed compliance to this request. In marked contrast, actually trans people want to present as the opposite gender so well, so authentically, that they no longer NEED to declare their gender. They want to pass as that gender — no questions asked. How do we know? Because trans people born male are PAYING MONEY to have their penises removed. I need to cry for a second. But fine. If that’s what they want to do, FINE. That’s freedom. But it’s NOT freedom when I am forced to speak, forced to declare the obvious in an obvious situation. Here’s what I wish I would have said:

“No. I’m not going to declare my pronoun. If you’re making a special request of me to call you by a specific pronoun, then I’m happy to oblige and use “him and he” because I would have thought you identified as a girl. So thank you, so much, for letting me know. So, to clarify, you are asking me, Sarah, to refer to you, _____, by him and he, is that right?”

And in response to further cries from the crib requests to declare my pronoun, if necessary, “you can use whatever words you want in reference to me – your perception of me has no bearing on my perception of me. If there is anyone in the room in doubt as to my gender identity, please, just go with your best guess.”

The depths of the collective cultural denial of reality that were required for everyone in that room to subserviently go along to get along are astounding to me. And I apologize to myself for not being ready for it. That will never happen again.

This is how far this movement to normalize the collective denial of reality has gone already:

These people want there to be NO genders at ALL, no defined categories. They’ll tell you they don’t want “labels” but they really don’t want any gender at all. And that is the stuff of a dystopian nightmare. I will blog further about what I see as a possible future if we continue to go down that path but for now, let me close with a little story about my parents, yes — the ones who met in a Las Vegas casino, my super liberal mom and super libertarian dad. They didn’t want me to feel forced into any gender stereotypes as they raised me so my childhood bedroom was decorated in all primary colors. No pink and no blue allowed. My sister, 12 years older than I am (and 12 at the time), got to pick everything out so she picked out wall art with bright bunches of balloons — orange, red, yellow and green, and cute white clouds, all fabric, to hang on the walls. The blanket was a bright bold red and the pillows were green and yellow (they put a twin bed in the room with the crib so that the room would be multipurpose from the get go). Somehow she got away with a fabric rainbow wall-hang because “a rainbow is an actual natural phenomenon in nature” (dad) and “it’s not pastel” (mom) so there was one stripe of blue in the room when the original rule was no pink or blue. Now, the carpet: it was fabulous shag magenta carpet (come on, it was 1981). I loved this carpet till the day I left at 18. My sister sold this to them as purple (yes, she grew up to be a lawyer) and they in turn had a long discussion about whether purple has a gender stereotype attached to it. (Sigh. I know.) Now, I was allowed to pick out the toys I wanted as a child and was never forced to play with anything or told I couldn’t play with anything. Guess what my favorite thing to do was? Play Black Jack or 500 or Gin with my mom — or games like Clue or Who Dunnit with whoever would play, and I love love LOVED the game Tripoley. I had some dolls and even though I liked Nintendo and was fairly good at it, I loved to watch my cousins rescue Princess Peach for HOURS (my one cousin could do every single level, no warp tunnels, in about 28 minutes — I couldn’t get past level 6). I’d beat anyone who’d play Duck Hunt against me hands down and my cousin and I would partner against my mom while playing Nintendo Jeopardy. No one told me I couldn’t shoot the Nintendo gun because I was a girl but interestingly, I hated playing any sports, HATED IT. I hated being outside, especially if it was cold, and I hated being on teams, so fricking much. I naturally gravitated toward activities that made me think, like reading, writing or games. I liked Barbies but got very bored very quickly unless I was creating an elaborate backstory for their lives. So there was no attempt to keep me from pursuing stereotypical “girl” activities. Nor was there any attempt to force me to pursue “boy” activities. When I was 15, my mom let me paint my whole room lilac and hang a poster of Brandon Lee from the Crow above my bed. It said, “Believe in angels.” (Best movie of ALL TIME — lol, the traditional gender roles! And the vengeance! And the violence! And the sex! Bahahahaha! My mom got a kick out of the results of their experiment: Give a child total freedom and exert no influence over their tastes and preferences and when that child grows into a 15 year old girl, she might still end up being filled with glee at the romance-based serial murder of anyone who threatens the eternal love of the main characters.)

Compare my parents to the parents of the newborn baby mentioned in the tweet above, the baby with no “gender marker” on its health card. My mom and dad were trying to avoid ridiculous societal limitations such as, “boys become doctors, girls become nurses” and “girls become paralegals and boys become lawyers” and they did a damn good job. But by denying a newborn baby a sex on its birth certificate, the parents in the tweet aren’t rejecting stereotypes or “traditional gender roles,” they are denying REALITY.

My parents did a good job despite their many flaws. They taught me to question the motivation behind every message: who is telling me to believe this? Why? What emotion is it designed to make me feel? What action is it designed to make me take? Who benefits? Who profits? Is it rooted in greed for power or greed for money or both? These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves regarding this bizarre movement mandating forced speech and the attempt to neuter society itself.